Engage and Align Your Employees with Your Business Strategy

How do you engage and align employees and how do you go about it? Employee engagement is achieved by strengthening and developing the competencies and skill sets of your people coupled with a communication plan to clarify both the business strategy and workplace expectations.

That’s a tall order, you say? Here are 10 steps that can help you improve your employee engagement:

1. Focus on Development of a Communication Plan – this plan of action enables everyone to understand the overall business objectives and how their role and responsibilities relate to the strategy of your business.

2. Focus on Responsibility, Accountability and Self-Empowerment – encourage individual ownership of a project or task, and have each of your employees design a plan of action that will create the willingness by all to be held accountable.

3. Create a Goal and Results-Oriented Culture.

4. Use Appropriate Metrics to Measure Progress – Use a tiered system of goal-orientation both upward and downward toward your businesses goals.

5. Ensure Consistency by Thinking in 3’s – Three goals relative to the company, each department, and each person.

6. Monitor – Review compliance of the goal-oriented process and the results at all levels helps maintain your culture of goals.

7. Identify performance gaps – When a gap is spotted, determining which learning and training initiatives to focus on makes decisions easier.

8. Review Your Performance Management Process – Ensure your process maximizes the use of individual development plans to reinforce the overall goal-orientation plans.

9. Create an Internal Employee Action Marketing Plan – This compliments the achievement of your business strategy.

10. Revisit the Vision, Mission, and Purpose of Your Company - Upgrade if necessary.


It is important that HR Professionals focus on the Five C’s of Engagement to gain alignment. If you focus on the Five C's , you will certainly give your company the “Slight Edge”. In other words, a competitive advantage in this highly competitive global marketplace. It is time to realize that people can make the difference but only if they are totally engaged.


Richard Hohmann
Senior Vice President
Innovative Leadership
Phone: 609.390.2830
Cell: 609.980.0086
rohmann@innovativeleadershipdv.com